In a proposal examined today by Lusa, Councilor Joana Rodrigues advocates for expanding public nursery spaces for all children up to three years old. She urges the government to identify state-owned buildings throughout Porto and ensure necessary investments to increase capacity.
The CDU justifies the need to expand the public nursery network as a measure to combat demographic decline, noting a report from the Center for Planning and Evaluation of Public Policies that highlights “limitations in the availability of places in public facilities and IPSS, which restricts universal access” to free nurseries.
District-wide, Porto is “one of the regions with the least nursery coverage relative to its resident population (35%),” which at the municipal level, the councilor believes should not be “overlooked.” She remarks that parents often choose nurseries near their workplaces rather than their residences.
In Porto, there are 48 institutions under the “Happy Nursery” Program, covering nearly two thousand children, a figure the CDU labels as “insufficient.”
“Reality has shown a shortage in supply, preventing families from finding nursery solutions that meet their needs, confronting them with uncertainty, long waiting lists, and the possibility of leaving work to care for their children, adopting remote work, or finding non-institutional solutions,” the proposal states.
